Sunday, 9 March 2014

Book Review: Hold me closer Necromancer by Lish McBride

Sam leads a pretty
normal life. He may not have the most exciting job in the world, but
he's doing all right—until a fast food prank brings him to the attention
of Douglas, a creepy guy with an intense violent streak.

Turns
out Douglas is a necromancer who raises the dead for cash and sees
potential in Sam. Then Sam discovers he’s a necromancer too, but with
strangely latent powers. And his worst nightmare wants to join forces . .
. or else.

With only a week to figure things out, Sam needs all
the help he can get. Luckily he lives in Seattle, which has nearly as
many paranormal types as it does coffee places. But even with newfound
friends, will Sam be able to save his skin?

My Review: There is a lot to like about this book and let me start with the cover
of my edition. Ooh shiny with a nice big member of the crow family on
the book! Nice!

OK on to the book. I liked the characters,
starting with Sam. He is the Mr Average that you have as your best
friend, who nothing exciting ever happens to-until now. His smart ass
friend Ramon is a bit of a joker but when trouble comes, he is deeply
loyal to his best friend. Then we have nerdy Frank who is one of life's
victims and zombie Brooke. You'll find out for yourself what I mean when
you read it. I also loved Mrs W, the sex obsessed pensioner who lives
next door to Sam as she was very funny, always disappointed to hear that
Sam isn't sleeping around and partying. Ashley was a lot of fun to read
about and I enjoyed her appearances. We also meet Brid the werewolf,
who is a tough and snarky gal used to taking care of herself, and a few
other side characters. They are all likeable and are nicely developed
within the book plot.

Then we have the bad guys. As an uber
baddie, I just could not take Douglas seriously and I found him as scary
as potato salad. If this is the most powerful necromancer in the USA,
why would he have Michael, the world's most useless werewolf as his
sidekick, screwing everything up? OK so to be fair, Michael is good for
comic relief in the plot but he doesn't do much to the evil image of
Douglas. He was more Artemis Fowl than Lord Voldemort on the bad guy
terror scale but maybe that is how we are meant to feel about Douglas.

I
liked the story of poor confused Sam trying to work out what is going
on when Douglas wants to kill him, then having to do research on
discovering that he is a powerless necromancer. Frank excels himself
with his computer research at this point! I liked the fact that the guys
had no idea what to do other than wandering around occult shops asking
random weirdos for help until they stumble onto someone genuine. That is
when the family secrets all start to come out, adding another level of
interest. There is also a lot of good humour in the book which readers
of all ages should enjoy. There is not a massive amount of action until
the end of the book and I would have liked it to be a bit more fleshed
out but that's me being picky. The plot did develop nicely and left a
few interesting things open for book two.

The one thing that
dropped down the book rating a half star was the section of the book
when we started switching over to the Brid chapters. A few of these
could have been skipped because all that really happened was Brid
exchanging insults with Michael and sitting around a cell which was not
particularly exciting. And it slowed down even more when Sam gets
captured and the whole book slows to a crawl. I just needed the middle
section of the book to have kept the same pace as the rest of the book
and I would have given this book 4 stars. As it was my interest in it
dropped a bit until the action picked up a bit with Ramon trying to help
find Sam and Douglas teaching him lessons.

I did however love
the zombie panda plot and I was amused by the way that and the Brooke
story were resolved. I liked Tia's story and hope to see more of Uncle
Nick in the future and of course Mrs W stole every scene that she was
in.

So overall the 3.5 star is well deserved. There is one
sexual scene but it is very much implied, not described so I would rate
the book suitable for adult and older young adult readers.

4 comments:

I love when there are smartass friends, they tend to be the highlight for me. I know what yo mean about the bad guys. I've read a couple books like that, and I just couldn't take them seriously. Great review!

I'm a member of Kindle Scout and you can find me on Goodreads, Pinterest, Twitter or you can leave a comment here or follow me on bloglovin or something. Don't be shy, say hi!

All dvd covers used here are the property of their respective film studios and are there to advertise the film only, under fair use copywrite law. I make no claim to the images or make any financial gain from them. All other images on the site are from free usage sites such as Pixabay.